Roller shutters or blinds on the ground floor

We are also currently considering which direction to take. Our house was built in 1921. Well insulated, modern windows. I would have preferred to have shutters, but that is not possible on all windows due to space reasons, only folding shutters could be used. In any case, that would be the nicest for the building year. Roller shutters would only be possible as an external wall-mounted version, since the facade is still in good condition. But that really looks awful. We don't want to spoil the house with that. Basically, I would find them good, on nice days I go outside and have no problem with complete blackout inside, as long as I can escape the heat. In the attic, we have roller shutters and I love them. Then blinds. We could install those ourselves, visually also okay. But in terms of heat protection not as effective as roller shutters, right? For us, only something with the so-called medieval manual operation would be an option. For that, the new windows would have to be drilled through, which is also not nice. Then I saw such heat protection parts from Austria that clamp on, sounds good at first. But they have only been on the market for a short time and are not cheap either. But for these we wouldn't have to damage anything. I am going around in circles, somehow there is simply no good solution, especially not for retrofitting...

Without googling, those from Austria. The appearance no matter what looks sh...

Without googling, the ones from Austria. Surface mounting no matter what looks crappy

Yeah, well, surface mounting is also out of the question.

I looked again and there are indeed other alternatives to the Austrian Blinos; there are various exterior blinds for drilling on and also some where you don’t even have to damage the window. I need to look into that further. I don’t want to spend a fortune on it either. Our facade is still completely fine, but it is nonetheless already 28 years old. I don’t want to spend thousands of euros on something that we might remove again in 15 years. I can’t really estimate right now when the facade will need work again (and when roller shutters can then be mounted flush), but definitely not anytime soon. The Blinos probably wouldn’t fit anymore if we ever redo the facade. Of course, the question is how long they actually last, and I am basically skeptical about that. I want something now that can stay like that long-term. We once had a rental apartment with exterior blinds that were over 20 years old and still in good shape.

Only the last two summers were so unbelievably hot that even our well-insulated old building with comparatively little window area and thick walls eventually warmed up, and we really don’t need that. Thank God we don’t have south-facing windows, but the sun blasts the east side from early morning until at least 2 p.m...

The east side is often underestimated. I have the feeling our bathroom gets the most sun. It is somewhat southeast-facing from the first ray of sunshine until around 1/2 pm.
Try it out in one or two rooms before equipping all the windows.

Yes, definitely. We would first test in the children's room, as we urgently need protection there and there is a very large window. If that works well, then the two living room windows and later maybe the kitchen and another children's room, but those face west and the sun only comes around late. In the bathrooms on the west side, the sun arrives so late that we don't need anything there at all.

There are quite a few prejudices against screens here. Every type of shading has advantages and disadvantages. That screens always wrinkle and are bad to look through... is however not true. However, it is also the most expensive solution among roller shutters, blinds, and screens. There are also a few screen users here in the forum. The fabric plays a big role. Today we did the IB and reference drives with some. For us, the right decision.